Job Numbers: Hope for Obama, a Bummer for Romney

I swear I could hear the sighs of relief all the way from Sesame Street.

The latest monthly jobs report is out and, for those people who simply use it to keep score, it may well evaporate whatever momentum Willard Romney was planning on surfing after his stunning performance as a quasi-human carbon-based life form on Wednesday night. Unemployment dropped to below 8 percent for the first time in nearly four years. (That's going to force a considerable rewrite in god alone knows how many prospective Republican campaign commercials, and we'll see about the polls.)

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To me, anyway, the president's political survival always has depended upon whether or not he could enlist the public sentiment in the task of bringing the economy back, whether or not he could make it a "we're all in this together" kind of thing wherein the country could take a collective pride in even the smallest uptick in one economic indicator or another. I think he's been hamstrung in this by a number of factors, some of them completely his own fault. He shied away from the most obvious methods of enlisting public pride in an economic comeback; the stimulus was too small, and he declined to make a public spectacle out of punishing the people and the institutions most responsible for the catastrophe in the first place. The economic calamity of 2008 was not, after all, a collective act. It was brought on by a small, very identifiable group of people — most of whom happen to be in Willard Romney's dayplanner, but we'll get to that — and by a small, very identifiable group of institutions, most of whom, it should be said, happen to be in Timothy Geithner's dayplanner. So, for a number of reasons, it's taken a while for the president to convince people that bringing the country back from where this tiny, greedy claque left it bleeding in a ditch, was something akin to people coming together after a tornado blows through town. In this, the new jobs report can only help.

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Because, for all his simple-minded and completely mendacious twaddle about the genius of the American people, it's Willard Romney who's out there touting pie-in-the-sky, top-down solutions. Hire him to be CEO of America and his magical personal mathematics will make jobs appear out of thin air. Let him take an ax to regulations and the economy will boom. Let him personally dig the ditch for the Keystone XL pipeline and we'll all be paying $1 a gallon on the way to our $10-an-hour jobs in the booming new sky-pony production facilities. He's not asking for the hard work of recovery. Leaving aside the fact that he was hopelessly dishonest the other night — and leaving aside the fact that he's now trying to erase the worst thing he's ever said in public — he's also trying to get the country to turn its back on what it can legitimately take as its own hard-won optimism. Where does he get off, anyway?

The unemployment figures still suck a great deal of pond water. But not hardly as much of it as before. Ask me what I think of it, and I'll say I'm happy, but that I'm also dreading the deadening effect of whatever Great Idea comes out of Washington to avoid the "fiscal cliff" of sequestration, which, you may recall, was the Great Idea of a year or so back, and what the president and congressional Democrats might sign themselves onto in response. But, in the current battle over who owns the country's hard-won optimism over the next month, the president got a big boost, while leaving his ruff-tuff challenger to meep away futilely in the background:

"This is not what a real recovery looks like."

Tell that to the people who have jobs again. Tell it to the people who feel better about themselves.

Sesame Street is brought to you today by the number 7.8, and by the letters W, for "Willard," and B, for "bummer." If the guy were any wetter a blanket, you could use him to put out forest fires.